Rohm joins leadership of energy-harvest group

LONDON Ė Japanese chip company Rohm Co. Ltd., which trades as Rohm Semiconductor, has announced it is taking a leading role in the EnOcean Alliance, an industry group working on standards for energy harvesting and wireless technology for use in energy-efficient buildings.

Rohm has joined and become the ninth "promoter" of the not-for profit EnOcean Alliance. Promoter is the highest of three levels of membership and this gives Rohm a central role in supporting EnOcean's battery-less wireless technology.

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The EnOcean Alliance has more than 250 companies in its membership and is based on the idea that originated at EnOcean GmbH (Oberhaching, Germany) that a switch can be used as a wireless signaling station to control in-building resources thereby potentially removing the need for a great deal of copper wiring. In addition the "on" or "off" signals can be powered by the manual actuation of the switch. The EnOcean solution now involves the collection of energy from the environment from multiple sources including motion, light, and temperature differentials. The EnOcean Alliance has been a non-profit organization since April 2008. The wireless standard is based on ISO/IEC 14543-3-10 WEP protocol for low-powered devices.

"EnOcean's battery-less wireless and maintenance-free technology has the potential to bring new opportunities not only to the building or home energy management system sector but also to the sensor network market, which is expanding into the management of infrastructure, logistics and health care products" said Hidemi Takasu, managing director of headquarters R&D at Rohm, in a statement.

In practice, because this transmission is once in a while, the amount of cross interference should be in-significant. On the other hand, I am more concerned at the robustness of the protocol used and its real-world ability to get the data across without being interfered.

Is this technology going to interfere with WiFi? (is it broadcast at 2.4GHz?)...I already have so much interference with 7 devices at home that try to connect to connect not to mention all my neighbors that in some rooms have stronger signals than my router...strangely enough freshly purchased iPAD is the worst while two iPhones never get messed up, some laptops come in the middle losing Internet connection only ocasionally, so is the wireless printer...do I need another wireless signals at home? NO! (in addition I do have wireless garage door opener, security system and few cordless phones in addition to smart grid meter my energy supplier installed without my knowledge)...Kris